Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (; 19 February 1904 – 25 June 1950), anglicised as Maurice O'Sullivan, was an Irish author famous for his Irish-language memoir of growing up on the

Great Blasket Island The Great Blasket () is the principal island of the Blasket Islands, Blaskets, County Kerry, Republic of Ireland, Ireland. It was home to a small fishing community of Irish speakers until the island was abandoned in 1954 when living there becam ...

and in

Dingle Dingle ( Irish: ''An Daingean'' or ''Daingean Uí Chúis'', meaning "fort of Ó Cúis") is a town in County Kerry, Ireland. The only town on the Dingle Peninsula, it sits on the Atlantic coast, about southwest of Tralee and northwest of Kill ...

, County Kerry, off the western coast of Ireland.

Writings

''Fiche Blian ag Fás'' (''Twenty Years a-Growing'') was published in Irish and English in 1933. As one of the last areas of Ireland in which the old Irish language and culture had continued unchanged, the Great Blasket Island was a place of enormous interest to those seeking traditional Irish narratives. Ó Súilleabháin was persuaded to write his memoirs by George Thomson, a linguist and professor of Greek who had come to the island to hear and learn the Irish language. It was Thomson who encouraged him to join the Gardai rather than emigrate to America as most of the young people did. Thomson edited and assembled the memoir, and arranged for its translation into English with the help of Moya Llewelyn Davies. While ''Fiche Blian ag Fás'' was received with tremendous enthusiasm by critics, including

E.M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly '' A Room with a View'' (1908), ''Howards End'' (1910), and ''A Passage to India'' (1924). He also wrote numerous short stor ...

, their praise at times had a condescending tone. Forster described the book as a document of a surviving "Neolithic" culture. Such interest was tied up with romantic notions of the Irish primitive, and thus when Ó Súilleabháin tried to find a publisher for his second book, ''Fiche Bliain faoi Bhláth'' (in English, ''Twenty Years a-Flowering''), there was little interest, as this narrative necessarily departed from the romantic realm of turf fires and pipe-smoking wise-women. Dylan Thomas commenced, but did not finish, a filmscript of ''Twenty Years a-Growing''.

Personal life

Following the death of his mother when he was six months old, Ó Súilleabháin was raised in an institution in Dingle, Co. Kerry. Aged eight, he returned to Great Blasket Island to live with his father, grandfather and the rest of his siblings, from whom he acquired an understanding of the Irish language. He joined the Garda Síochána in Dublin in 1927 and was stationed in the Gaeltacht area of

Connemara Connemara (; )( ga, Conamara ) is a region on the Atlantic coast of western County Galway, in the west of Ireland. The area has a strong association with traditional Irish culture and contains much of the Connacht Irish-speaking Gaeltacht, ...

, where he kept up contact with Thomson. In 1934, Ó Súilleabháin left the Guards and settled in Connemara. Ó Súilleabháin drowned on 25 June 1950, while swimming at Knocknacarra Irish Times 26 June 1950, which states that he was "a Civic Guard, stationed in Oughterard" off the Connemara coast.

Published works

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:OSullivan, Maurice 1904 births 1950 deaths Blasket Islands Irish-language writers Irish memoirists Irish police officers People from County Kerry 20th-century memoirists